Monday, August 13, 2018

Loss of Signal, by S.B. Divya

[Tor.com]
★★★★☆ Powerful, Evocative, and Moving

(SF Adventure) Toby exchanged his dying teen body for command of a lunar spaceship. He’ll make history if he succeeds, but he’s still just a kid, and it’s dark, cold, and lonely out in space. (2,048 words; Time: 06m)


"," by (edited by Carl Engle-Laird), published on by .

Mini-Review (click to view--possible spoilers)

Pro: This is the story of  Toby’s struggle to move beyond his “worthless” dying body to a new, exciting existence with the whole solar system at his beck and call.

The story does a great job of making Toby seem helpless, weak, afraid. He needs to talk to his mother. He may not have his old body anymore, but he hasn’t escaped it.

And then he realizes he's much more than that.
But I wasn’t helpless. I was a rocket. I had engines. My new body thrummed with latent power. 
Time to write a new story.
And it’s not just a victory for Toby: it’s a victory for other kids like he was and for humanity as a whole.

It absolutely moved me to tears. It’s easy to make readers cry if a story is sad, but it’s quite a challenge to get tears of joy.

Con: A machine would likely handle firing the engines; you wouldn't need a person for that. Someone like Toby would have been essential for remote-operating equipment on the surface of places like Mars and Venus though.

Apollo 8 actually did do a free-return without firing an engine. It’s Apollo 10 that he’s (roughly) replicating.

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